Spotify on New Product Development

The most important part of the product definition is the narrative. What story are we going to tell the world?
What will the press release look like?…

…The key thing here is: the narrative is written before the product is built! That way we make sure that the
product is compelling before we even build it.

In addition, the Think It squad builds lots of different prototypes to experiment
with the look & feel of this product – both “lo-fi” paper prototypes and “hi-fi”
runnable prototypes (but with fake data sources and such). Internal focus
groups are used to help figure out which prototypes best convey the narrative,
until we’ve narrowed down to just a few winning candidates.

This is an iterative process with no deadline. The product is simply not worth
building until we can show a compelling narrative and a runnable prototype that
fulfills it, and we can’t decide upfront how long that will take.